Heidi Specogna’s potent documentary painstakingly recounts the story of the first U.S. casualty of the Iraq War – a young man from Guatemala named José Antonio Gutierrez – by tracing his voyage from Guatemala to Iraq, by way of the United States. Gutierrez’s compelling, and compellingly sad, story is recounted largely through interviews with acquaintances of the young soldier that together suggest how Gutierrez’s case embodies the complexities of two topics central to the U.S. today: immigration and American foreign policy. Preferring to methodically follow the traces of Gutierrez’s life, Specogna lets audiences draw the larger conclusions for themselves, offering her film as a kind of remembering, and mourning, of a young man whose life might otherwise be lost to history.

Originally conceived as a meditation on the beauty of the American south and inspired by her love of William Faulkner and James Baldwin, this documentary by Chantal Akerman was radically transformed by the lynching of James Byrd, Jr., a black man, in Jasper, Texas, which occurred only days before filming began. Journeying from Virginia, down through Georgia, and across to Jasper, South investigates the Texas community and its brutal crime with the same classically composed imagery which Akerman used to examine such distinct places as Eastern Europe (D’est) and the U.S.-Mexico border (From the Other Side), documentaries united by their notable use of hypnotically long travelling shots often filmed from a car or a train. In South, Ackerman’s austere and exquisite camerawork hauntingly and horrifically retraces the route along which Byrd was dragged to his death.